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5 Things You Must Know About Restless Legs

1. RLS or Rest less syndrome is having an unpleasant sensation in your legs and you really feel the urge to move your legs to get away from the sensation. These symptoms usually occur at night when you lie down and try to sleep and lasts more than an hour. Restless leg syndrome may occur due to various reasons like peripheral neuropathy, chronic kidney disease, Parkison's disease, and drug side effects to certain medications. Restless leg syndrome also may occur during pregnancy. When this unpleasant sensation occurs, you feel like moving about or moving your legs etc to get relief.

2. What causes restless leg syndrome is a mystery encircling the medical community and there are no tests to identify this. Occasionally a drop in hemoglobin is checked for and you doctor may prescribe a blood count with hemoglobin and hematocrit to make sure you have the required iron content in your body. If the iron content is normalized the symptoms would go away, and you may be prescribed iron supplements. If the symptoms are due to pregnancy, after delivery the symptoms may not occur. It is imperative that you do not take medications or keep your number of medications low if you are pregnant because most of the medications affect the child in some way or the other, sometimes it is evident, and other times it is not.

3. Stress can also be blamed for the cause of restless leg syndrome, as the nerves keep on firing continuously and when you voluntarily relax your leg muscles this would causes an unpleasant feeling and you move the leg to ease the nerves and hence the feeling is gone. Counteracting stress with diet and lifestyle are very important in combating restless leg syndrome as stress should be managed with lifestyle and the use of stress management techniques.

4. Sadly, there are no known cure in conventional medicine for restless leg syndrome, as this is merely a symptom than a disease. Probably some underlying cause for this is to be found out to get relieved of this symptoms in an effective manner. There are no known complications arising out of restless leg syndrome, but if the symptoms are going on long enough insomnia may set in and sedative drugs are used to induce sleep and when the therapy is over you may be relieved off your symptoms. Use of sedative drugs are not the preferred choice of treatment as its use causes addiction to drugs, and it is difficult to wean off the drug.

5. Alternative treatments like taking a warm foot bath and the use of hip baths to induce proper undisturbed sleep are best sought. Gentle stretching exercises like yoga practice is also emphasized in the natural treatment of restless leg syndrome. Gentle massage therapy administered to the legs helps good blood flow and blood return from the legs that may alleviate the symptoms a bit. People diagnosed with periodic limb movement during sleep are highly susceptible for this symptom, and natural stress relieving methods and proper sleep initiation, posture, and relaxation techniques are highly emphasized to prevent one from getting this symptom.